Tag Archives: This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About

This is the first edition of a new series of posts here on Airwaves. In ‘The Full Picture’ we will look over a notable alternative artist’s entire discography and note how the sound evolved from album to album, as well as pointing out each album’s best tracks using the magical powers of hindsight. The perfect starting point for me with this is to cover my favorite artist out there: Modest Mouse. All the EPs and every album (just not the two cassette tapes from 1993), starting off with…

Modest Mouse- “Blue-Cadet 3 Do You Connect?” (1994)

The first release for the band is an EP in 1994 named after the title track “Blue Cadet 3-Do You Connect?” and it packs five songs into 7 minutes and 34 seconds including a minute long intro for “It Always Rains on A Picnic“. On this first EP Modest Mouse is incredibly depressing in it’s song topics already, with the aforementioned title track existing as a question to a man lost in space being followed by 30 seconds of silence. The ending track “5-4-3-2-1 Lipsoff” is a thirty second track where we get Brock giving social commentary for the first time, as he makes jokes in the background and references his own lisp before ending the EP with the most profound statement on the album “Whatcha want, whadayou want from outer space?”. Overall some of the best qualities of Modest Mouse are present on this release, but the band wasn’t able to really write a full song at this point.

Modest Mouse- “This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About” (1996)

It’s hard to fathom what a gigantic step forward the band took with this release, and the progression is obvious the second that you hear the opening guitar on “Dramamine”. No wasted time, some anger, and a decisive message in the music. You get to hear Brock get pissed off on this album through tracks like “Breakthrough” and his f*** you message to the people fleeing Washington to California, “Beach Side Property” (really one of two on the album along with “Head South“). Another really interesting thing which develops on “Beach Side Property” is how the rocking track where Brock opens with a loud, throaty scream, suddenly slows down and turns into Brock incorporating a religious metaphor into the song. This album is the first time that the band incorporated the religious theme into their music and it proved to be a topic where Brock was very good at displaying his viewpoints. Another huge difference between this was how Modest Mouse jammed, as they’re only one on Blue Cadet-3 was on “It Always Rains on a Picnic” which was noticeable more mellow. On This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About (TIALD from here on out) the more rock oriented jams show up to establish Modest Mouse as what they truly were, a 90s alternative rock group who was capable of morphing their sound into the other genres as well.

Modest Mouse’s second EP released is what they’re demo tape was, and it contains some great Modest Mouse songs on it like “Edit the Sad Parts”, “Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (Positive/Negative)” and “Broke“. Still, I’m not going to go into this EP because all of the songs found their way into another album where they are better known and more easily identified, and this EP is viewed nowadays as more of a collector’s item than anything else.

Modest Mouse’s name today is often associated with their most successful single “Float On” from their 2004 album Good News For People Who Love Bad News, something that frustrates basically every Modest Mouse fan out there. This is because before the radio airplay Modest Mouse was still an extremely relevant band within the Alternative Rock genre, with This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About proving to be an extremely successful debut album and their third album The Moon And Antarctica fascinating many music critics and showcasing a lighter sound alongside the philosophical thoughts about religion and creation which Brock had to offer. These early albums were both created with the “classic” Modest Mouse lineup that featured Isaac Brock on vocals and guitar, Eric Judy on bass and Jeremiah Green on the drums, an extremely consolidated lineup but one that had tremendous range and capability. This is why although many point to The Moon and Antarctica as their best album, my personal favorite is their 2nd album, The Lonesome Crowded West, which captures the wide range of sounds the band is capable of and defined them as a premiere alternative rock group of the era. The album sometimes gets viewed as a concept album because of the recurring themes of both the destruction of the west to build mini-malls and religious topics, but those are really common Modest Mouse topics that the band uses on many of their tracks outside of LCW as well, so it’s a bit of a misguided label.Continue reading Essential Albums: Modest Mouse- The Lonesome Crowded West→